Should Melbourne follow in New York's footsteps to save pedestrian lives?

A New York City police officer directs traffic through New York's Times Square.Credit:AP

Melburnians, are you ready to kick your speed addiction?

It’s a question being asked by a visionary US official, who has saved lives by helping his city overcome a deadly predilection – not for the illegal substance, but for speed on city roads.

Michael Replogle, deputy commissioner for policy at New York City’s Department of Transportation, has led a bold road safety strategy that has seen pedestrian deaths cut by nearly a quarter over the past four years.

That number has risen by 15 per cent across the rest of the country over the same period.

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The safety strategy, carried out in a city where pedestrians are killed in crashes more than any other road user, involved a series of “simple” steps that could easily be adopted by cities such as Melbourne, Mr Replogle said.

Under the plan, traffic signals were altered to give pedestrians an extra seven to 10 seconds to cross the road. An extra 40 kilometres of protected bike paths were also built and intersections were redesigned to widen footpaths and median strips to allow pedestrians more road space. Traffic lanes were reconfigured to slow down turning vehicles.

But key to the success of the campaign, Mr Replogle said, was cutting road speed limits from nearly 50 km/h to 40 km/h on local and arterial roads.

This was done on a key thoroughfare, Queens Boulevard, which was once branded the “boulevard of death” due to a consistently high annual road toll that rose to 18 deaths in a single year. There have been no deaths on the road in the three years since the speed limit was lowered.

“Speed increases the likelihood of a pedestrian dying from a road crash,” Mr Replogle told The Age in an exclusive interview.

“When vehicles are travelling at 30 miles an hour, there is an 80 per cent of death, but if we can reduce the speed to 25 miles per hour, the chance of the pedestrian dying drops to 30 per cent.

“It’s very important to reframe these conversations into what’s worth more – a life, someone you love, or saving a minute. Because that’s what it comes down to.

"Our society is so consumed with the idea of rushing about ... we don’t step back and think about the consequences of not saving time.”

The pedestrian road toll has fluctuated in Victoria over the past five years, with 12 pedestrians already killed this year, including a 14-year-old girl Aivy Nguyen who was hit by a truck last week.

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There were 416 pedestrians killed on Victorian roads in the 10 years to January 1 this year.

Victoria’s high road speeds was brought into question when a mother and daughter died in a crash outside Lighthouse Christian College in Cranbourne East, which was a 100 km/h zone.

Mr Replogle, who has rolled out hundreds of speed cameras around schools leading to a 75 per cent reduction in speeding, said he was appalled at the 100km/h speed limit outside the school. (The speed on a section of the South Gippsland Highway was reduced to 80 km/h after the incident.)

“That’s crazy,” he said. “In front of a school, that just doesn’t make sense.”

Reducing road speed was recommended in this year's annual road safety report by the International Transport Forum, which revealed that Australia has among the world’s highest speed limits for rural and regional areas, with limits set at 100 to 110km/h.

This compared with average speeds of just 70 to 90km/h on rural and regional roads in Norway, Sweden and Switzerland – countries with the lowest road toll.

The move was lambasted by Victoria Police and the Transport Accident Commission.

Ben Rossiter, executive director at Victoria Walks, said Melbourne had "so much to learn from New York". He called for 30km/h speed limits in the Hoddle grid and in dense inner residential streets, particularly around schools and shopping strips.

In 2013, 189 pedestrians died in New York. Last year, this dropped to 101 deaths.

The reporter was a participant at the 2018 International Transport Forum at the OECD.